The Best Free Congress Trading Tracker in 2026

Every congress trading tracker pulls from the same source: the STOCK Act requires every Periodic Transaction Report to be filed publicly, so none of these companies own the underlying data. What actually differs between them is what "free" gets you, and whether you can get the data out of their dashboard and into something you're building. Here's what each of the four main options gives you for $0, and where that stops.

Capitol Trades — free, but browser-only

Capitol Trades is the cleanest of the four, and it's genuinely free: no login, no upgrade prompt, no paywalled section. It covers roughly 200 politicians, filterable by party, committee, and state, with full trade histories per person. If you want to look up what one senator traded last month, this is the fastest way to do it.

The limit is access. There's no API. To get the data into a spreadsheet or a script, you're copying rows by hand, or paying a third-party scraper service (Apify and ScrapingBee both sell one) that sits on top of Capitol Trades and re-serves its pages as JSON — a paid product wrapped around a free one.

Quiver Quantitative — free to browse, not free to use

Quiver's free tier lets you browse its congress trading dashboard. Alerts, CSV export, backtesting, and full historical depth sit behind a website subscription, and by one 2026 pricing review, that runs $15–30/month depending on tier. The API is a separate product with no free tier at all — the cheapest plan with programmatic access starts around $30/month. Quiver's dataset is wider than congress trades alone (insider trades, 13F filings, lobbying, government contracts, corporate donors), but none of it is free to pull into your own code.

Unusual Whales — a free tier that isn't really about congress trades

Unusual Whales is primarily an options-flow tool. Congress trading is one feature among many, and the free tier reflects that: 15-minute-delayed data and a limited slice of the platform, confirmed directly on their own pricing page. Full access — including politician trade data on the paid tier and the API — starts at their Retail Basic plan, $50/month. The API itself has a one-week free trial, then requires payment. If congress trades are the only reason you're there, that's a lot of options-flow tooling to pay for on the side.

Quantgress — free API, no tier to graduate out of

Quantgress is smaller and newer than the three above, worth weighing on its own. What it has: a free hosted API. Sign up with an email, get a key, start querying, capped at 500 requests/day instead of a paywall. There's no paid tier to eventually hit — right now the free tier is the only tier. It's also open source (MIT-licensed) and self-hostable, so the scrapers themselves are inspectable, and you can run them yourself against the same primary sources (efdsearch.senate.gov, the House Clerk, SEC EDGAR, FEC, USAspending, USPTO) instead of depending on a hosted key at all.

The dataset goes past congress trades: insider Form 4 filings, 13F institutional holdings, lobbying filings, government contracts, patents, corporate donors, executive comp, even the sitting president's own OGE disclosures — closer to Quiver's breadth than to Capitol Trades' or Unusual Whales' single-feature version. The honest trade-off: no dashboard, no alerts, a newer and smaller project than any of the three above. What it doesn't cost you is money.

Which one to actually use

Depends on what you're doing with the data, not which one wins in the abstract:

Looking something up once, in a browser — Capitol Trades. Free plus no login beats everything else here.
Building something with the data — a script, a dashboard, a bot — without paying for API access — Quantgress is the only one of the four with a genuinely free API tier right now.
Want the widest dataset with a mature, polished paid product, and have budget for it — Quiver.
Already paying for Unusual Whales for options flow — the congress data comes with what you're already paying for; don't buy a separate $50/month plan just for that.

Quantgress's API signup is here — free key, 500 requests a day, no card required.